Print

Print, dated 1720, carries only the generic museum title within the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection record (source_url https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/37135), but the 1720 date situates the work within the late phase of Torii Kiyomasu I's documented career, before the death of the first Kiyomasu around 1722 and the transfer of the signature to the workshop's second-generation bearer. Without a specific actor, role, play, or subject identification preserved in the museum record, the print must be situated within the general Torii workshop output of the early 1720s, when the workshop was producing both single-sheet yakusha-e in the established hosoban or wide-bordered tate-e format and tsuji banzuke advertising posters for the three licensed Edo theatres. The bold contour line characteristic of the Torii hand, descended from the hyotan-ashi gourd-leg and mimizu-gaki earthworm-line stylisations the workshop had developed for kabuki imagery, carried the workshop's visual signature across all of these production categories. The early-1720s Torii workshop was transitioning fully from the earlier hand-coloured tan-e mode toward the larger monochrome sumizuri-e sheets that allowed greater compositional ambition, with the bold black outline taking on nearly the entire expressive weight of the design. The Metropolitan impression preserves a representative document of the workshop's late Kiyomasu I production at the moment of transition between the founding tan-e period and the maturing sumizuri-e idiom, even where the specific iconographic identification of the print remains unrecovered from the surviving museum record.